


Weather Advisory

by standalonefic



Category: The Long Walk - Richard Bachman
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Different setting, M/M, Pause in the Action, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-06 03:47:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8733589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/standalonefic/pseuds/standalonefic
Summary: But Art was talking about the hurricane they’d had twelve years ago, the one that had, six hours in, closed the Walk down for almost a week.  The Squads had worked overtime to clear the roads again and there’d even been talk of shutting down the continental walk, standardizing the location.  Garraty had sat through the footage of the protests in every history class since the second grade.  THE LONG WALK IS FOR ALL AMERICANS.  THIS LAND IS WALKER LAND.“Those dumb bastards,” Abraham said.  “You have to feel sorry for them, don’t you?  Getting a week’s break only six hours in?  I bet they hadn’t even handed out five tickets yet.  Most of them probably weren’t even winded.”(A tornado warning means Garraty and McVries get a moment to themselves, not that they really know what to do with it.)





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ninety6tears](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninety6tears/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide!

The word kept coming back on it. One of the boys—lanky, wheat-haired, with a massive strawberry-colored birthmark on his neck—was from Kansas and he knew the signs. Stacked clouds, lemon-lime sky.

“Lemon-lime sky?” Parker said incredulously. “Does it want to kick up a tornado or sell me a goddam Sprite?”

Garraty let out a sigh that even to him sounded like air coming out of a bike tire. “I’d take the tornado if I could just have the Sprite.”

“It’ll dehydrate you,” Abraham said. “Soda pop always does, you know. It’s the sodium. They rack those fuckers so full of sodium, you might as well be drinking cans of saltwater.”

McVries had gone a while without talking but then he opened his eyes. Garraty was surprised to see almost violet shadows underneath them. He kept looking at Pete and seeing the way he had been when they’d started and then Pete would dissolve like some kind of inkblot test and take on a new shape: somebody exhausted, somebody who needed to lie down. He almost caught himself saying McVries should cool it and rest for a while.

“Unless one of you wants to say that a tube of lemon chicken washed down with canteen water comes anything close to Sprite,” McVries said, “we can table it.” He wiped a line of saliva off his chin from where he’d been dozing. He was unselfconscious about it, and Garraty found himself looking at the damp streak it left on the back of his hand. “What are we talking about, gentlemen?”

“Tornado weather,” Garraty said.

McVries smiled a weary kind of smile.

“Go on,” Abraham said. “Tell us we’re kidding ourselves.”

“Every Walk has a weather advisory story,” Stebbins said. He was still several feet behind them and he kept to the same steady pace, not stepping up to join with them, only pitching his voice to carry. He still sounded mild.

“Son of a bitch,” Parker said. “It speaks.”

“In California, they talk about earthquakes. In South Carolina, they talk about hurricanes.”

“There _was_ a hurricane,” Art said softly, and Garraty knew at once that he’d been holding on to that for a while: it was an idea whose nap had gotten worn down from close handling, like this brown velvet teddy bear Garraty had had as a kid, with a red-stitched mouth and two blue button eyes. His dad had made it for him and for a long time—too long, probably—he had slept with it under one cheek, like a second pillow. He hadn’t thought about that in years.

But Art was talking about the hurricane they’d had twelve years ago, the one that had, six hours in, closed the Walk down for almost a week. The Squads had worked overtime to clear the roads again and there’d even been talk of shutting down the continental walk, standardizing the location. Garraty had sat through footage of the protests in every history class since the second grade. THE LONG WALK IS FOR ALL AMERICANS. THIS LAND IS WALKER LAND.

“Those dumb bastards,” Abraham said. “You have to feel sorry for them, don’t you? Getting a week’s break only six hours in? I bet they hadn’t even handed out five tickets yet. Most of them probably weren’t even winded.”

“Well, I could sit down and not mind it,” Art said. “If it’s true.”

Garraty looked hopefully at the sky, which really had turned an unhealthy kind of green up ahead of them. The soldiers, of course, were still stone-faced, not a one of them even pointing the clouds out to the others or turning to his radio with a little worry-mark stamped between his eyebrows.

“It looks bad,” he said.

“Hail will come first, though,” Parker said, “and the bastards will make us walk through that, you know it. But I’ll smile up at the sky and let the hail bust the teeth right out of my mouth if a good-sized tornado will just blow through.”

“What do you think?” Garraty said to McVries, lowering his voice. They had already fallen into their own peculiar conventions on the Walk, as mannered in their way as if they were at some kind of garden party: private conversations sprang up even in the midst of a pack of Walkers, with everyone averting their gaze and pretending not to hear.

“Do I think we’ll get a tornado or do I think I could sit down and not mind it?” He smiled, and it raised the scar on his cheek: Garraty felt the sudden crazy desire to trace it with his thumb and know if Pete could feel there just as well as he could anywhere else. “Ray, I think if we talk anymore about putting our feet up I might cream my jeans, that’s how much I want a tornado. I’d let it blow me away, even, as long as it got me off the road.”

“You could be one of those people you hear about sometimes,” Garraty said, “one of the ones who get swept up and then dropped down naked in somebody’s yard with nothing more than a nosebleed.”

McVries raised his eyebrows. “Naked?”

Garraty felt his face warm. “Sure,” he said lightly. “Your jeans would need a wash by then anyway.”

McVries pushed at him a little, not hard enough to get an interference warning, and just like that their bubble was broken and the outside conversation poured back in again. Stebbins was out of it once more—putting one foot in front of the other with no expression on his face at all—but the general consensus among the rest of them was yes, there would be a tornado, God, let there be a tornado and they would all go to church on Sundays, they would all vow to use the Prize to feed the hungry and heal the sick, they would—this was Abraham’s contribution—cut down to jerking off only once a day.

“I knew I was right to be nervous about you walking with your hands in your pockets so much,” Garraty said.

“That’s right,” Abraham said. “Nothing but pocket-pool all day. Keeps the strength in my legs.”

“Not all of us are lucky enough to find true love,” Parker said.

McVries laughed. “That’s you, Abe. A _touching_ story.”

“That’s it,” Parker said, throwing Garraty a sideways kind of look.

Garraty showed his hands. He didn’t know what had crawled up Parker’s ass and turned itself sideways and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

“How would they let us know, anyway?” he said. “If they had to pause the Walk?”

And just like that, a low siren blatted through the air and the soldiers began spilling onto the road, gesturing those at the front up into the half-track. They all moved with surprising, rapid fluidity, like water bursting through a dam, as if it could be called off at any second—and, Garraty supposed, it could be. He was still standing in the road, aware of his mouth hanging open a little. He was going to be able to sit down. Maybe even sleep.

“Keep working your magic for us, Garraty,” Art said as they all climbed up together, musketeers with aching feet and popping knee joints, Collie Parker actually sobbing a little, dry-eyed but gasping, breath ragged. “Next up I want a five-course meal.”

Garraty couldn’t laugh because he was too busy trying to convince his drunken legs to stay upright a little longer. Now that he was standing in place, their foundations had gone wobbly. He wondered idly how much of the Walk was about not dying simply because there were other people around and you didn’t want to be embarrassed by it, the way he was trying not to fall now because the rest of them hadn’t. He gritted his teeth. In another minute, he was seated alongside McVries. They were all packed together like sardines—sodium, Garraty thought madly—and so he was jammed up with his hand against Pete’s. He could feel the rough, dry edge of a torn cuticle. Then, suddenly, he could feel the heat of McVries’s chapped palm, because McVries was holding on to him. He was still looking straight ahead, but down in the gridlock of all their legs, he was holding Garraty’s hand.

Garraty didn’t know what to think about it. But there wasn’t enough room for him to take his hand away even if he had wanted to, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to. It was fine, he decided. They were all so tired. Somehow that seemed like its own excuse, the way being drunk might have been.

And no one could see. He was very sure of that.

“Where are we going?” Abraham hollered over at the soldiers. “You boys can talk now, can’t you?”

“They won’t,” Art said. “I’ll bet you anything.”

“Sure,” McVries said easily. “I wouldn’t, if I were them. What’s in it for them? It’d be like naming ants in an ant-farm or, I don’t know, getting chummy with every blade of grass right before you mowed the lawn.”

“Murderers.” It was the first thing Olson had said in hours. Even off his feet, the color hadn’t come back into his face. “They’re murderers.”

“If you go into the doctor for an appendectomy, you don’t call him a butcher just because he cuts you open. You don’t run out screaming when you wake up with stitches. You knew what you were getting into, didn’t you?”

“Theorize all you want,” Garraty said. He was surprised by how harsh his voice sounded. “They’re not going to stop themselves from pulling the trigger just because you went to all this trouble understanding them.”

McVries flashed him a smile that seemed to cut through the gloom. “And it’s my lot in life to be unappreciated.”

“It’s my lot in life to sit,” Parker said, stretching out his legs as much as he was able. “Cancel me out of this one, boys, and sign me up for the Long Sit.”

Abraham kicked Parker’s feet back into place. “That’d be just as bad in the end. Bedsores and stewing in your own piss and shit.”

“You really know how to put a great spin on things, Abe,” Garraty said, and sourly, because he couldn’t stop himself from picturing it: all of them in some dull cinderblock auditorium in cheap folding chairs. He didn’t realize Pete was rubbing little circles into his hand until it had been going on for a while and then it seemed wrong to draw a line at it, because it couldn’t be a big deal when he had barely felt it.

The wind was picking up and the roar of it coupled with the way they rumbled along against the road was enough to kill off the rest of the conversation. Garraty knew what they were all thinking, anyway: he could feel them running inventories of their bodies, their split toenails, their threadbare socks, their baggy muscles, their bruised heels, their aching backs. Someone on the far end ate a tube of tuna spread and stank the whole place up with fish, but at least it cut a little through the funk of sweat. His hand was sweating into Pete’s. Nobody, not even Stebbins, pointed out the obvious—that as nice as it was to have a rest, as soon as the weather cleared, they would be back on the road again. They would feel fresh again, though not as fresh as they once had. But they would walk themselves down in the end.

The tornado had bought them a few hours, maybe even a few days, depending on what it did to the roads. But the Walk was still out there.

It wasn’t until they stopped with an abrupt jerk that he realized he had fallen asleep. He had been dreaming of something. Not walking.

Hands, he thought, a little disconnectedly. He’d been thinking about hands. His own—both of them—had fallen asleep.

The soldiers got them out at gunpoint.

“Like we need that,” McVries said, slipping out of entanglement with him and down the side out into the open air like it was all nothing, as natural as water running downhill. Garraty lumbered out behind him, feeling like Frankenstein’s monster. “You’d need a gun on me to _stop_ me from lying down.”

The soldiers’ expressions didn’t change—as eggshell smooth as ever—but for a nauseating second, Garraty thought they would step into the featureless brick building and see long scuffed black treadmill belts on the floor. His fear of it was almost like a rush of acid into his throat. Whatever he’d thought about the rest being pointless in the end didn’t matter. Even if it was just a few more hours, he would take it, and he needed it now. He needed it.

But it was just a gymnasium. Plain blond wood planks with bleachers folded up flat against the walls and blue plastic mats spread out over the floor like rafts.

“No mints for our pillows?” McVries said.

“No pillows for our mints, more like.” But he couldn’t stop himself from smiling. He almost reached out for Pete’s hand again and then he caught himself and chafed his palm against the side of his leg.

Somebody Garraty didn’t know flung himself down on a mat hard enough that the bounce of his body echoed like the smack of a basketball and called out: “God bless tornadoes. God bless Arkansas. God bless those fucking protesters back in nineteen whatever.”

“God bless us, every one,” McVries said in a falsetto Tiny Tim voice. “Ray, where are you bedding down?”

“You’ll want the corner somewhere,” Stebbins said. He had a Cheshire cat kind of smile on his face. Surely even he was glad of a chance to lie down and sleep. “Won’t you?” He seemed to be addressing the space in between them so Garraty didn’t know whether to answer or not.

McVries only shrugged. “Why not.” His voice was as flat as one of the mats. There was nothing stopping them, after all, from going all the way to the wall, against the stacked bleachers, almost around the side of them.

It was something of a blind corner, but the guards showed no concern. Whether or not they could see all the Walkers was irrelevant; they could see all the doors, along with all their heavy chains and padlocks. He and Pete were close to one of them, but it was reinforced steel, and Garraty didn’t even daydream about getting through it. He figured the Squads had a place like this around every Walk site, just in case. Stebbins had said every Walk dreamed of getting a weather advisory and the Squads had never met a dream they couldn’t have a contingency plan for. He snorted a little to himself.

“What’s funny?” McVries said with strange sharpness.

“Nothing. I’m just tired, that’s all.”

“If only there was someplace to lie down.”

“Wiseass.” He laid himself down tenderly, almost one muscle, one joint, one bone at a time, as if his body were china he was trying not to break. He closed his eyes and when he opened them again McVries was down beside him, turned to face him. The cheek with the scar was pressed flat against the mat and without it he looked different, like some stranger. But he didn’t want McVries to be a stranger.

“Switch me.”

Surprise flickered up in Pete’s face like a flame off a lighter, but he got up, wordless, and switched, and when they were both down again, he looked like himself again.

“I wonder if people will sleep or not,” McVries said.

“What, you think we’ll all be too jumpy? Wondering when they’ll wake us up again?”

“I like how unworried you are about the tornado, Ray.”

It hadn’t occurred to him to be anything other than grateful towards it. He could understand, suddenly, all the people over time who had sacrificed goats to weather gods. It felt almost normal, and so some kind of relief, to have disaster once again seem random, something that could come or not come, happen or not happen, and while he was thinking about that, he let himself push forward and suddenly his mouth was almost against Pete’s.

Pete stayed perfectly still. Garraty could feel the warmth of him and it seemed like he could feel the stillness, too, like that lack of movement had a physical weight.

Almost anything seemed permissible as long as neither of them broached that stillness, the eye of that particular tornado. Schrodinger’s cat. He didn’t want to open the box, he didn’t want to know. Stebbins had said they would want the corner, like he had known before they had, but it could be—it still could be—that there was nothing to know.

“They won’t have it here again,” McVries said. On the “o” of the “won’t,” his lips—dry, chapped—brushed Garraty’s a little, but nothing about it counted. “Arkansas will throw up a couple of polite protests and then give in.”

“They didn’t give in before.”

“What, because the Long Walk is the ritual that knits the country together? What makes us who we are? And the Major, the Squads, they just wrung their hands in the face of the will of the people and accepted it?”

“You think I’m being naïve,” Garraty said, and he was almost glad of that, glad to have some reason to be angry.

“I think it must be appealing to give out a concession that just so happens to polish the fuck out of the apple you’re trying to sell. Everybody goes home happy.”

“Well, it’s a nice thing for you think of now. That whole ‘we’ve been had’ thing of yours. But here you are anyway,” with a strange sound in his voice, like he was pissed at McVries just for being there. “Not going home happy.”

“I have a policy, Ray,” Pete said, “of never getting smart until after it will help,” and then Pete did kiss him.

It was nothing like kissing Jan. With the way they were lying against the mats, it was too hard to find the right angle, and his nose kept bumping Pete’s. Pete’s stubble rasped against his skin. There was nothing like the easy, summer-sticky incandescence he had felt with Jan on those long, funnily desperate days, but all the same, he couldn’t stop, couldn’t get enough of him, of this headlong thing that had all the ruthlessness of the ticket. He wanted—wanted something. The way McVries started sounding ragged or the funny softness at the center of his palm or the way he had said they could dance forever and he’d never get tired. The kiss he had blown over his shoulder like he was throwing salt.

There was what Garraty wanted and what he needed and he didn’t know why he thought kissing McVries would help him tell the difference.

Eventually, of all the things, it was a cramp in his leg that made him stop. He rolled onto his back and lifted it up to his chest and rubbed his calf muscle. If that had happened a few hours before—

McVries watched him without comment. He wondered if McVries thought he was faking it.

At last it eased and then there was just the way his mouth still felt to say that anything had happened. What would count as getting smart after it would have helped? Which part?

He tried to imagine what it would be like to be back in the Walk again with McVries not speaking to him and something switched off inside him as neatly as a light turning out. He had to say something. None of it mattered except for that. It was a weather advisory, he wanted to say, and they would all be out again soon enough. It was only a pause. Nothing that happened here could change anything.

He said, “Listen, you can hear it roaring. It must be close.”

McVries swallowed. The silence went on just a few seconds too long and then he said, “It sounds like a train.”

“Maybe it’ll roll right over us.”

“Tear the roof off the place,” McVries said, letting his arm brush Garraty’s as he put his hands behind his head. Garraty knew that for the challenge it was, the challenge not to flinch, not to look, not to react in any way.

“And scattering all the soldiers,” he said, “like somebody kicked over a toy-box. GI Joes everywhere.”

“Plus Barkovitch.”

“Plus Barkovitch,” Garraty agreed. “What would you do?”

“They’d come eventually. You know that. Even if we ran.”

“I know.”

“I think,” McVries said, “that I wouldn’t bother running. Could you imagine being the asshole who wasted his legs running trying to get away from the Walk? No, Ray, I think I’d just lie here. The roof would be off and that would be fine, that would be good—all the hail would have stopped by then. I’d lie here just like this and I’d look up at the stars. Try to remember some of the poems I used to know. What about you?”

Garraty closed his eyes. “I could help you pick out constellations.”

“You know them?”

“My dad taught me.”

“Then it’s a date,” McVries said, with the same deliberate lightness, and Garraty didn’t blush, didn’t turn away. Barely even breathed. He wasn’t going to let it happen—he wasn’t going to let McVries make it happen—this thing where they fought. Where they talked about it at all. Where he pushed Pete away or Pete pushed him away or both.

He remembered the steps of the rumba, he remembered the steps of the cha-cha. He practiced them in his head and that kept him from thinking about anything else.

He could hear the hail rattling against the roof.

“I’m cold,” he said. “Sleep back-to-back with me, Pete,” and without saying anything else, without even saying good night, Pete did.

And somewhere in the middle of the night, Garraty must have rolled the other way, because when the soldiers woke them up sometime into a gray, foggy morning—steam rising up from the warm ground where the hail still lay in golf ball chunks—his knees were up against the insides of Pete’s. His ear hurt from sleeping on his side. Even the cartilage felt bent. He’d always slept on his back, every other night of his life, with his hands across his stomach like he was Freaky D’Allessio in his coffin, so rigidly posed. Like he was already dead.

But not that night.


End file.
